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Linux (Kubuntu) on Dell Latitude E5430

tl;dr important stuff all works. Minor stuff like finger print scanner easily fixable

The hardware is 'certified' by Canonical but this is meaningless because it doesn't say what of the many options Dell offer for the E5430 was used. It also doesn't list correct details for hardware such as Bluetooth, or even that the finger print scanner exists. And there is no way to submit fixes. And the contact us page is 404 compliant. So let's hope Google finds this for you instead :-)

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Linux

ColdFusion forgets to use UTF-8 files after logs rotated

For a long time, it's been recommended to set up Linux's logrotate system to manage the size of cfserver.log, which can easily grow to be a very large size on production systems, and ColdFusion seems unable to manage itself, unlike the other logs.

I recently discovered however, that a restart of ColdFusion via logrotate was changing the way files were written and read.

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Linux

ColdFusion

Dell have abandoned Linux users, no matter what Ubuntu say about it

I got a Dell laptop a few years ago, and while scouting around for it's replacement I noticed the Ubuntu Linux folks are still proud to say their stuff not only runs on Dell kit still, but that it's available to purchase and have supported direct from Dell:

"purchase Ubuntu on Dell"
http://www.ubuntu.com/dell

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Computer

Linux

Technology

Using your Amazon Web Services Summit 2011 card under Linux or MacOS #awssummit2011

For reason's best known to some brain dead marketing monkey, I got given a USB device that only works correctly on Windows. Have you ever seen a ghost in the machine open the run box, type in a web address and launch a browser with out asking ? Neither had I, and fortunately Linux and MacOS users don't have that problem. But how to get your free credit from the AWS Summit 2011 ?
I found a way.

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Linux

Technology

Adobe leaves Linux AIR users hanging with surprise cancellation

Today Adobe announced AIR 2.7 is out, but also that they will no longer be supporting AIR on Linux.

Given that it's also official that Adobe will not be supporting hardware acceleration in Flash Player on Linux any time soon this concerns me - and it should concern you too.

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3D WINE games crash when KDE is using effects (solution)

Although some excellent older games are listed as working really well on Linux through the WINE system, there appears to be an issue when KDE desktop effects are enabled. WINE say this is Intel's fault.

The workaround is to disable these effects automatically when the game is run.

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Quick note on upgrading Fedora Core 12

I notice other people as well as me are getting an error when doing a 'yum' based upgrade (with distro-sync) from Fedora 12 (to 13 or 14).
The error is along the lines of "/lib64/libdb-4.7.so from install of compat-db4 conflicts with file from package db4-4.7.25-13.fc12".

For me, the fix was to upgrade just rpm and yum, then the rest. I couldn't upgrade rpm and yum without removing kudzu, but apperently the kernel does Kudzu's job now anyway.

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Reaction to Flash Builder on Linux cancellation

Well, you can't blame me for trying (by opening the official bug). Despite being the 2nd most popular, and fastest growing, platform for web development, Adobe have finally told us what their plans for their Flash Builder on Linux are: termination.

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Linux

Flex

Merging two different Amarok 2 collections

I don't think it's that uncommon to have two different installs of the excellent media player Amarok (for instance one at work and one at home) which share a media collection (over Dropbox or manually with rsync, for instance).
The problem is there is no way to synchronise the scores and ratings between these two computers, so I've had to build one.
I figured it might be useful, so here are the details of the steps to take, and a small Perl utility need to help out.

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Linux

Flash Camp Manchester 2010

The latest Flash Camp event was held in Manchester last week, and was a day-long series of talks designed to inspire Flash and RIA developers - a 'taster' as we were told during the brief warm up.
Right off the bat everyone who went got a bunch of awesome freebies, from Thermos mugs to Adobe Rubik cubes, full copies of the FDT ActionScript IDE and a free film from the blinkbox streaming site; fairly awesome for a free event.

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